What's got me honked off!

Friday, March 19, 2004

Ads, ads, ads

Some are entertaining, but they are few and far between. Some are just stupid. And after most of them, you can't even remember what the product was that they were trying to sell you, let alone what the reasons were to make you want to buy it. But the real problem is ads that only try to sell you by bad-mouthing the competition.

Here it is only March, 2004 and already the dirty political campaign ads are starting to clog the airwaves. And this morning I awoke to an ad from an incumbent local telephone company who could only justify its position to raise its wholesale rates by blasting lies and innuendos about a specific competitor. And I just read a news article about how a broadcast radio network is putting out ads with half-truths about the competition from satelite radio. It's nothing new; remember the ad wars between Satelite TV and the cable companies. Oh, right, they're still bombarding us with that crap. Shame, shame, shame! I'm sure there are other examples, but they currently slip my mind.

I think we need a fair decency act in advertising - of any kind. After all, the FCC is going after indecency in broadcasting with their usual right-wing driven zeal! Sure, I agree that broadcasters need to clean up their act and make sure people like Howard Stern are only broadcasting their dirt when children won't be listening. And there was no excuse for the Janet Jackson incident. But I am getting side-tracked.

My proposal for the FTC to enact is that no advertisement may make reference to another person, company or product, either explicitly or implicitly, other than itself!

Can you imagine. Politicians would only be able to tell you why you should vote for them in positive terms. They could only tell us what their plans are for moving this country forward.

Imagine that a company could only try to tell us why they're jacking up their rates is to line their own pockets. And we could only learn about the benefits of cable television instead of the supposed flaws in their competitors products. BTW, I happen to think that cable has a lot of those benefits now, only because they've started providing some great services (e.g., HDTV and on demand programming).

So I challenge the current government to provide us some real decency. Lets get our advertising out of the gutters as well as our regular broadcast content. "W," are you up to the challenge?